


so eden sank to grief, so dawn goes down to day

by akaparalian



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gender-Neutral Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, M/M, Minor Allura/Lance (Voltron), Pining Shiro (Voltron), Pre-Relationship, Season/Series 08 Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-02 23:23:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16796749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaparalian/pseuds/akaparalian
Summary: Shiro watches him go down.





	so eden sank to grief, so dawn goes down to day

**Author's Note:**

> This is gonna get Jossed in, you know, like two weeks when s8 airs, but ah, well. This is a fill for "Presumed Dead" on my Sheith card for Voltron Bingo -- the last fill I needed to achieve bingo, yay! 
> 
> I originally had planned a much more involved fill for this square, but shit got really real really fast, and I just ran out of time, so... Maybe I'll finish that original idea up and post it one day, but in the meantime, I'm pretty happy with this one. Enjoy!
> 
> Title from [Nothing Gold Can Stay](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/nothing-gold-can-stay).

Shiro watches him go down.

There are shouts and crashes and the screeching sound of shearing metal all around, and smoke is filling his lungs with every coughing breath, and there are a million different things he could be looking at, but as Shiro stands on the bridge of the Atlas — as, all around him, his crew works to stabilize the ship after the massive hit she just took, and as people yell updates and status reports from every department all at once — amidst all of the chaos and the confusion, the only thing Shiro sees is Keith.

Not the black lion. Not Voltron. Keith. 

“Haggar got him,” he whispers to no one, or maybe to himself, as though saying it out loud will get it through the numb sense of shock that seems to have settled over his skin and inside his lungs and around his heart. “Haggar got — _no_ — Keith —”

“Captain Shirogane!” someone yells, and he jumps, turning, but at the very same time someone else cries, “Voltron Commander Kogane is down!”, and Shiro turns back to face the view screen again, his heart in his throat.

The image hasn't changed much in the half a second he was looking away: just a cloud of smoke where Keith had been standing a second before, gripping his blade and lunging toward Haggar — Haggar, who even now is slinking forward, her hands still crackling with quintessence and magic and who know what else.

"No," Shiro whispers again, his breath stuttering. No, not this, not after everything. Not _Keith_. 

"Captain Shirogane!" someone calls again, and this time he shakes himself, hard, and forces himself to turn, even though every instinct he has is screaming at him to do — something, anything. Jump out of the ship and crash down to Earth himself, fire everything they have on Haggar in the hopes that maybe their whole plan had been wrong and just shooting at her will work, _something_.

All he can do, though, is this. Abandoning his crew to fight the rest of this battle themselves will do nothing; deviating from the plan and wasting resources firing on Haggar will do nothing. None of it would benefit Keith, regardless, not if he's — if Keith is — 

"Status report," Shiro calls, and tries his best to pretend his voice is steady.

— 

The battle itself, they win by the skin of their teeth. The part with Haggar — well, the best information Shiro has is that it came down to Allura somehow, and maybe also Lotor, which he supposes makes sense. The rest of it, the part he was responsible for... Atlas takes heavy damage, and so do the MFEs, but in the end they take out the last of Haggar's druids and robeasts and everything else she tries to throw at them, and when Shiro finally touches down dirtside again, for just a second, in the relieved adrenaline of the battle being over and won, he almost forgets.

Almost, but not quite, because as soon as he can — as soon as Atlas touches down on Earth, as soon as they unseal the airlock, he's running, certain he's too late but also certain he can't not go. He has to know; he has to see, has to...

There's a part of him that's thinking of Adam, thinking about if this is what it would have been like if he'd been on Earth when Adam died, or at least on Kerberos, or something, instead of blissfully unaware, off gallivanting through strange and unknown regions in a gigantic robot lion. There's a part of him that's remembering, through his clone's eyes, what Keith had looked like when he was desperate, with a sword all but held to his throat, certain he was about to die. What he had looked like, sounded like, when he'd said, _Shiro... I love you._

It's not hard to find his way to where the battle with Haggar had been pitched. For one thing, he'd gotten a pretty good view of the entire battlefield from above; for another, it's easy enough to just follow the trail of destruction, charred patches of earth and the lingering smell of ozone that he associates with druid magic.

Shiro doesn't see any of them at first — the lions are gathered around, but he can't see their paladins, too many Coalition soldiers and Garrison personnel crowding around and shouting orders at each other and blocking his view. He pushes through the crowd almost blindly, shoving and looking around, wild-eyed, searching for any scrap of the familiar paladin armor in and amidst everything, and then all at once, there they are — all of them, even Coran and Romelle. 

All of them, gathered around a body.

"No," he whispers to himself, one last time, and then he all but dives for them, shifting into a dead sprint through the crowd.

Hunk sees him first; the sudden motion must catch his eye. "Shiro!" he calls, but Shiro's already almost there by the time the words leave his mouth; he's holding his hands up placatingly, his eyes wide, as he watches Shiro come careening towards them. "Shiro, wait —"

"No, no, no," Shiro's saying, barely hearing himself, and then he's shoving Lance aside and diving between Allura and Pidge to get to the ground, and there's — there's Keith.

He's so pale. His scar practically looks crimson against the sugar-whiteness of his skin, and that's not even counting the large quantity of blood that's smeared and dripped across his face from what appears to be a massive blow to the head. His eyes are closed, thank God. Shiro doesn't know what he would have done if he'd come down here and found Keith's eyes staring at him, open and glassy and dead, but it wouldn't have been pretty.

He reaches out with a shaking hand and brushes a strand of hair back out of Keith's forehead, away from the blood.

"Shiro," someone says, and he doesn't do or say anything, can't bring himself to respond if respond means tearing his eyes away from Keith or moving his hands from where they've come to cradle Keith's cheek and neck. 

But then someone touches his shoulder, and says more insistently, " _Shiro,_ " and he looks up, just a little, just out of the corner of his eye, and it's Allura. Her face is open and sympathetic, tear-stained but not — not — 

She's smiling a little. Just with the corner of her mouth, and her eyebrows are drawn together, and — why is she looking at him.

"I know it looks bad, but I promise, he's going to be okay," she says, and then a lot of other things that Shiro knows full well he should be listening to, because they're probably incredibly important, but he completely lost his ability to pay any attention when she said the word _okay._

"Wait," he interrupts, turning fully to look at her for just a second before turning back to stare down at Keith again, unable to look away for long. "Wait — he — I thought —"

"I'm sure it looked horrible, especially from up there, but Keith is going to be _fine,_ " Allura tells him, stressing the word and squeezing Shiro's shoulder for additional emphasis. His head is spinning, and that's when he finally notices that Keith is — Keith is _breathing._

"He's just unconscious," Romelle says quietly from Allura's other side, and Shiro can't quite manage to look at her — to look at any of them, really — but he's sure the way his shoulders sag is probably response enough. 

"He took a big hit of quintessence, and it knocked him out," Pidge adds, and somehow that no-nonsense tone of theirs is the single most reassuring thing on the planet for Shiro in that moment. "We don't know how long he's going to be out for, but Allura says he's still in there, and he should wake up on his own, in time."

Shiro swallows, and finally manages a halfway coherent response. "You're — you're sure?" he asks, peeking up at Allura with just the slightest tilt of his head even as he pulls Keith more fully into his lap, cradling him against his chest for the sake of feeling his body head, pressing his hands against the chestpiece of his armor in a futile attempt to feel his heartbeat.

"Yes," Allura says, and her confident voice is the second most reassuring thing on the planet. "I can — well, it's a bit complicated, but I can feel him in the quintessence field."

"It's all a bit 'use the force, Luke,'" Pidge puts in, affecting an old man voice, which is especially apt given how old that reference is. "But, you know. We've gotten this far on 'use the force, Luke,' right?"

They really have, haven't they? Shiro holds Keith a little tighter.

"As I was about to say before Shiro busted in all dramatic," Lance says, finally taking his turn, "we should move Keith somewhere more — you know. Hospital-like. Not a battlefield. Out of the way of gawkers."

"Yeah, but if he was out of the way of gawkers, he'd have also been out of the way of Shiros," Hunk points out.

"Well, we have all of our Shiros accounted for now, so I suggest we make like a space tree and get the hell out of dodge."

"Matt says they're setting up a field hospital not too far from here," Pidge reports. 

Shiro nods, more to himself than anything, and then — carefully, so carefully — he stands, bringing Keith with him, keeping his head tucked snugly into the bend of Shiro's neck.

"Let's go," he says. "I'll carry him."

— 

The field hospital in question, unsurprisingly, is a madhouse, but being who they are, they manage to get Keith a bed and even a little privacy screen pretty quickly. If he were awake, Shiro's well aware he'd probably balk at the special treatment, and hell, he gets that, because if it were _himself_ he and Allura and the other paladins were pulling these strings for, he wouldn't like it either. But it's not for him, it's for Keith, and Shiro would gladly beg and plead with any number of Garrison medical staff for Keith. That's actually kind of the bare minimum of what he would do.

He doesn't really realize exactly how tired he is until he actually sits down at Keith's bedside. The chair isn't what one would necessarily call comfortable, but as soon as he's no longer on his feet, Shiro sways in place with exhaustion and has to startle a little to keep himself upright. It's only reasonable, he supposes; in addition to the battle itself, there had been the terror of thinking the man he loved had died right in front of his eyes, while he could do nothing about it, before Shiro had even gotten the chance to say anything to him about how he'd felt. He'd thought, for what seems now to have been an eternity, that Keith had died not knowing that when he told Shiro's clone that he loved him, Shiro, somewhere very deep under the surface, had been screaming it back to him, desperately fighting not to kill him. He'd thought that Haggar, who took his arm, took his autonomy, took his whole _being_ away from him, had also taken the best and brightest thing in his life.

And then he found out Keith was actually fine all along.

He wonders how long it'll be, in all this madness, before someone will come along with the time and resources to pour him a very, very stiff drink.

"You should really get some rest," Allura says from beside him, her voice gentle but firm. She sounds exhausted, too, and when he glances up at her, she certainly looks it. They're all pretty knocked out right about now, and Shiro knows she's right; he'll be no good to anyone if he collapses from exhaustion. Still.

"I can't leave when he's like this," he protests. Allura huffs a sigh at him that sounds incredibly put-upon for someone who should be riding high on the glory of taking out an incredibly powerful evil witch in a magic duel that Lance has already described three separate times as "seriously the most incredible thing I have ever seen, and let me tell you, I've seen a lot." "No one said anything about leaving," she says, rolling her eyes. "I know you better than that. I'm just saying, I'm sure we can find another bed; you need the rest. You look dead on your feet, Shiro." That feels quite a bit closer to using their clout and influence for *his* benefit, instead of Keith's, and on the one hand, Shiro's still not jazzed about the idea. On the other hand... He looks down at Keith, whose head wound has been cleaned and neatly stitched closed. With the blood washed off his face, he really does look like he's just resting, like he could wake up at any moment. His face is slack and peaceful. "All right," Shiro relents. "I'd — yes. Thank you." "Of course," Allura says immediately, placing her hand lightly on his shoulder. "I'll go and find someone who can help." By the time she returns with a nurse and an additional cot, Shiro is passed out slumped over in the chair, his head on Keith's mattress, his hand over Keith's chest, feeling for his heartbeat.


End file.
